Aug 07, 2017

It seems no matter what story you're looking to run - and no matter how insignificant the story - you will always be able to find some tweets to help prove your point (or indeed the opposite point, should you change your mind).

Jul 07, 2017

More than a decade ago, podcasts were the talk of the town; the next big thing for broadcasters, publishers and wannabe internet celebrities alike. And while podcasts have proved a popular addition to many peoples’ daily diets of digital content, it feels as though the past two years has seen the medium take off with a renewed vigour.

To test this theory, The Media Blog polled 1,352 podcast listeners and found 73% of respondents say they now spend more time listening to podcasts than they did two years ago. Only 5% said their time spent listening to podcasts has gone down in that time.

What’s more, 49% of respondents say they listen to five or more different podcasts each week.

A dedicated 14% say they listen to 10 or more, with comedy (66.5%), sport (51%), news and current affairs (47%) and movies and TV (38%) the most popular subjects in respondents’ podcast feeds.

How long should a podcast be?

And how long should a podcast be? More than a third (38%) of respondents said as long as a podcast is good enough, they’ll listen however long it is. However, 21% said an hour is just right and 20.5% opted for 45 minutes, while just 17% thought 30 minutes or less was long enough.

In terms of how people discover new podcasts, recommendations on social media are the biggest driver, for 71% of respondents. However, word of mouth recommendations come a close second (63%) and 90% of respondents say they have personally recommended podcasts to other people over the past year.

What are the most popular podcasts?

The survey also asked people for their favourite podcasts and the top 10 looked like this (percentages show proportion of respondents who named each podcast as a favourite):

Another tweet appeared to mock parents of children with autism, saying it was "funny" that the parents in question thought they had won their case, adding a winking smiley for good measure.

Yet another tweet featured a picture of a kitten (no really), apparently laughing at people who had criticised the law firm.

One of Baker Small's deleted tweets.

The tweets from the firm’s @BakerSmall account (now conspicuous by its absence from Twitter) were subsequently deleted, but not before they had drawn fierce criticism online and gained a far greater audience than the firm could surely have anticipated. With increasing media attention, it became clear this was no passing Twitterstorm. Despite an apology, the firm has been losing clients, very publicly.

First, Cambridgeshire County Council, one of the firm’s clients Tweeted: "Having taken legal advice, we can confirm that we will not be using [Baker Small] for new cases."

Then came a statement from Norfolk County Council. "We have informed Baker Small today that we will be making arrangements to cease working with them as soon as possible… our view is that tweets posted over the weekend were wholly inappropriate and do not in any way reflect how this council wishes to work with families."

Then Buckinghamshire County Council. "We have today suspended work with Baker Small until further notice."

And then Bedford Borough Council. "We are suspending any work with [Baker Small] with immediate effect and are reviewing the matter following these highly inappropriate tweets."

How much more business the tweets will cost Baker Small is yet to be seen, but whatever happens it will surely remain - for a while at least - one of the most remarkable self-inflicted wounds in an already rich history of ill-judged Twitter use.

Apr 22, 2016

In the 'How To Do Social Media Wrong' handbook there must by now be a whole chapter dedicated to why brands shouldn't try to exploit somebody's death, yet 3M's social media team clearly hadn't read it before hitting send on this heavily branded tweet following the death of Prince.

Nor had whoever at Cheerios thought this was a good idea.

The social media team at a breakfast cereal company say 'Cheerio' to good taste.

Clearly neither brand has learned from the likes of Crocs, so rightly lambasted earlier this year after trying to exploit the death of David Bowie in order to remind people how awful their shoes look.

There will of course be those who say "ah, but people are talking about them, so it has worked", before adding "there's no such thing as bad publicity, you know" - because somebody always says that.

But there is, which is no doubt why Cheerios subsequently deleted the above tweet.

The safest rule of thumb is surely to assume tragedies such as deaths and natural disasters are off limits as far as "real time marketing opportunities" go. It just seems incredible anybody actually needs to be told that.

"I want you all to know we're always listening. We never planned to reorder timelines next week," he tweeted (which isn't exactly a denial, especially if you stress the "next week" bit of that sentence).

Clarifying matters even less, Dorsey added: "Twitter is live. Twitter is real-time. Twitter is about who & what you follow. And Twitter is here to stay! By becoming more Twitter-y."

So there you have it.

Of course it's up to Twitter what they do with their product. A minority of heavy users with strong opinions cannot be the only audience a business ever considers, especially if it wants to grow. But it can seem at times as if the people at Twitter are the only people not happy with how simple their service is to use. Call it tinkering, call it always striving for better.

But having already given us the ability to follow and unfollow whoever we like and block and mute those we don’t, while making lists and using hashtags or clicking on trending topics which interest us, Twitter has provided all the power we need to decide what we see. An algorithmic timeline - like the much criticised 'While You Were Away' before it - seems an unnecessary attempt to complicate matters - something else to side step or dismiss on the way to your timeline.

This isn't about a fear of change - or certainly shouldn't be. Some Twitter innovations are great additions (personally I love the 'mute' function - so much more satisfying than blocking). But typically the innovations which are best-received seem to be those offering something new, something to make tweets more interesting, such as multiple images or streaming video, rather than the ones which impose just another way to rearrange the already ideal way we see tweets.

Dec 31, 2015

Social media managers may be resolving to pay closer attention to their calendars in the New Year after a few brands jumped the gun with scheduled tweets intended for midnight on New Year's Eve. Sadly for them they got the wrong midnight.

Highland Spring was among those who scheduled a tweet for 00:00 on 31 December 2015.

In fairness to all these brands, they may have gone a day early but their scheduled tweets are no more or less insincere for their bad timing and at least their tweets will get noticed, unlike hundreds of brands whose scheduled tweets will be appearing at the right time.

Nov 12, 2015

The Daily Express has named and shamed MP Simon Danczuk for apparently tweeting during Wednesday's two minute silence (something Danczuk has denied, blaming technical issues):

However, it seems like a case of 'do as we say, not as we do' from the Express who themselves tweeted during the two minute silence on Remembrance Sunday. This Carol Vorderman exclusive obviously couldn't wait:

Nov 08, 2015

Over the past few weeks certain sections of the media have been whipping themselves up into the annual frenzy over who has been spotted not wearing a poppy. It’s a free and easy source of manufactured outrage at a time when "free", "easy" and "outrage" are music to the ears of editors.

What's more, this year the media have been able to combine this annual naming-and-shaming with another favourite sport – turning anything Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn says or does into a scandal that will rock the nation.

The latest outrage follows some people on Twitter claiming Corbyn, while wearing a poppy and bowing his head when placing a wreath at the Cenotaph on Sunday, didn’t make enough effort with his solemn and simple bow.

The papers could have ignored such ridiculous criticism but then they were never going to pass up an opportunity for some Corbyn-related Remembrance-rage. The Sun has even put it on Monday's front page, with the misleading suggestion that Corbyn 'refused' to bow at all:

But The Sun was far from alone in blowing this story out of all proportion. Other papers too found themselves powerless to resist something that somebody said on Twitter.

Of course, the media and the "Twitter rows" they report on are far from independent of one another. Journalists are more capable than most of sparking a row on Twitter and on this occasion there were certainly those who pounced upon Corbyn's subtle bow of his head to ensure claims of outrage became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Some of the spite and satire of Twitter undoubtedly adds colour to many a story but in this instance it was a distraction from the stories that should be told on Remembrance Sunday. The UK media have done a good job of supporting the poppy appeal and the important work of the Royal British Legion in the past but the hijacking of the campaign in recent years to justify ugly finger pointing, name-calling and political point-scoring looks increasingly distasteful and demeaning.

Oct 14, 2015

It seems the English language has become so mangled by business speak that even "straight talking" has become synonymous with unnecessary jargon, euphemism and buzz words.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey yesterday emailed staff to announce a round of redundancies, promising them "I'm going to give it to you straight".

But of course these weren’t redundancies or lay-offs. After a little discussion of a "streamlined roadmap" and "a bold peek into the future" Dorsey announced "significant structural changes" to engineering that will enable Twitter to "move much faster with a smaller and nimbler team". What’s more, "the rest of the organization will be streamlined in parallel", enabling Twitter to "reinvest in our most impactful priorities".

Dorsey signed off his email by urging anybody with questions to "reach out to me directly", of course.

Jul 25, 2015

In the past week the UK national media have run over 150 news stories and comment pieces about seagulls.

The seagull has well and truly unseated the false widow spider of recent years to be the media's scare story of choice for the summer. To put the numbers into some perspective, at peak hysteria the false widow spider only generated 54 pieces of national coverage in its busiest week.

The Times, downplaying the media's role in whipping up seagull-related hysteria, has taken pause to ponder the nature of this "primeval dread", suspecting it might be innate in our psyches:

"Somewhere, deep down, we fear nature’s revenge. That fear discharges, irrationally, because it’s there and we’ll never get rid of it. Seagulls are not, commonsense informs us, a real risk to mankind but this year we fear them."

Others have been less thoughtful in their coverage:

The Daily Star, a long-time fan of animal scare stories, leads the way in reporting the "seagull terror" from above with stories of "seagulls waging war on mutant rats" to claims that "vicious seagulls will attack and kill babies".

Noisy

It should be stressed no babies have been killed. In fact, the reality to date has often been a lot less shocking. While the Daily Mail and others did report that a pensioner and a four-year-old boy both needed medical attention after being pecked by the "seagull menace" and a couple of pets have been killed, the Star also informs us that a family was "forced to flee a guest house when a plague of noisy seagulls kept them awake all night". That may have been frustrating but it doesn't feel like a national news story.

In the main the victims have reportedly been ice creams, pasties and sausage rolls but that hasn't discouraged the media from setting about the story like a flock of hungry seagulls mobbing a discarded chip packet.

It is a situation which has even brought journalists into direct contact with the "bloodthirsty", "terror-inducing" menaces. The Telegraph reported a "particularly sadistic" seagull attacked one of its journalists and a photographer as they left an ice cream shop in Brighton.

When much of the country's media is openly right-leaning it is natural the Conservatives would find the BBC's even-handedness frustrating - hence the regular cries of bias. But many of the arguments the government is putting forward to justify cuts don't stand up.

Take the suggestion the BBC is bad for local media, when a more pressing issue should be the extent to which local media owners are bad for local media - as highlighted by recent strike actions. Under-investment in journalism and effective digital strategies, alongside poor commercial planning, are hurting local media far more than a competitor that has been around for decades. But if you were the boss of a local or regional media company who would you blame for the falling quality of your product? Certainly not yourself.

The accusation that the BBC has gone "chasing ratings" clearly has a grounding in truth. What broadcaster doesn't want to draw an audience? It is the BBC's job to bring people together in good times, bad times, fun times and important times.

While programming such as The Voice (X Factor without the hit singles) or celebrity gymnastics show Tumble (Splash without the swimming pool) may expose the extent to which the BBC has made some bad bets in the name of entertainment, the obvious risk aversion and lack of imagination behind such decisions arguably makes a case for giving the BBC more room to breathe, not less. However, much of this is subjective and the debate cannot become about individual shows or even whole channels and stations.

Objecting to the licence fee because you can name a handful of programmes, or even whole channels or stations you don't like makes about as much sense as walking out of a restaurant refusing to pay the bill after an excellent, fairly-priced meal because there were other things on the menu you wouldn't have liked if you had ordered them.

The BBC's greatest strength is the choice it offers across online, television and radio. But the choice needs to be rich and diverse and the economics of content are such that we need to judge value carefully. Somebody who only watches niche documentaries on BBC4 may cry foul that their licence fee funds big budget prime time shows on BBC1 but 300,000 people watching a documentary on BBC4 are getting far greater value for money than 10 million watching The Voice, because they are getting a scarce product for the same price as a more commoditised product.

People enjoying the BBC's factual and documentary output benefit from the licence fee in a way that simply couldn't be recreated under any other funding model. One television historian told me commercial broadcasters may still commission occasional historical documentaries "but only if they are about Nazis or the Titanic". He was joking. But only just.

Sport

Nothing characterises the BBC's dilemma more than sport. Damned if it shows too much, damned if it shows too little. Take the recent example of the BBC being sidelined in the world of Olympic coverage which resulted in angry criticisms of the Corporation. The BBC arguably taught the world how to broadcast sport but is now being pushed to the periphery because money talks and the BBC is having to keep its voice down.

Love it or hate it, the role of sport in creating those moments which unite us should not be underestimated, nor should the impact of the BBC losing rights, because without its involvement sport is reaching ever-smaller audiences - the current Ashes series being a prime example. Currently the rights owners, such as sports' governing bodies, don't seem to care but in time they surely will.

Of course there are things we'd all change about the BBC if we could and we're all entitled to our moans - not least because - for now - we pay for it, not advertisers and not the government. Keeping the licence fee separate from general taxation and annual government budget reviews gives us all a claim over the services we receive and research shows the majority of us still favour the licence fee as the preferred way of funding the BBC (ICM, 2014).

As BBC Director General Tony Hall pointed out this week: "The BBC does not belong to the government. The BBC belongs to the country. The public are our shareholders. So it is their voice that will matter most in this debate."

Apr 29, 2015

Of all the reasons to criticise Ed Miliband, doing an interview with a popular online publisher, focused on politics and current affairs seems an odd one.

Sure, the online publisher in question is Russell Brand. Yes, Brand is ridiculous. Yes, he told people not to vote, but he has a large, young, potentially left-leaning following who are no doubt very capable of making up their own minds about whether to vote. On the face of it, it's easy to see why Miliband took the chance.

As an online publisher with reach into key demographics, Brand is very relevant. You don't have to like or admire him to acknowledge he's built an impressive media platform. Of course it's self-indulgent but as such it's arguably far more transparent than many other media outlets, owned and directed by distant proprietors with their own agendas.

10 Million Followers

Brand's YouTube channel has over a million subscribers. Each video gets between 100,000 and 250,000 views. It's fair to assume the Miliband one may get more viewers, from a broader audience and a great deal of wider coverage, because of all the publicity. To put his online influence into some context against more traditional media outlets, Brand's 10 million followers on Twitter compares to @TheSunNewspaper's 730,000 or @DailyMirror's 360,000. David Cameron dismissed Brand as a "joke" but sat down with Heat magazine, circulation 240,000, Twitter following 370,000.

That's not to say The Sun, The Mirror or Heat aren't also worthwhile outlets if politicians think they can get a fair hearing and reach an important audience. But the media is changing. Love him or hate him, Brand embodies a major trend as to where the media is heading.

Of course The Sun and the Daily Mail don't approve. They don't like Brand, they've been told by their bosses to attack Miliband and understandably they don't like any media trend that erodes the influence of traditional media. But it's hard to imagine their scorn will cost Miliband a single vote. After all, Mail readers can't abandon plans they never had to vote Labour.

Mar 24, 2015

As publications compete for clicks on social media, far too many are congregating around the hackneyed way of writing tweets and headlines that relies heavily on over-promising - "You'll never guess" (you probably could), "You won't believe" (you almost certainly will), "the best thing you'll read today" (it won't be, I promise) - and under-delivering - "what happened next will blow your mind" (it never does).

Once upon a time, simply not following a handful of publications was a guaranteed way to avoid such clickbait but now everybody seems to be at it (though some have been struggling to get it right as this effort from the Express shows):

"Is it The Shawshank Redemption?"

Speaking of doing it wrong, the crafting of such clickbait headlines and tweets tends to rely on a lot of assumptions about what we might already know, think, believe or even care about, such as"This video will change the way you think about cats...". Or they go so far as to tell us we've been doing something utterly mundane wrong our entire lives in the hope our nagging self-doubt and inherent insecurity about the way we peel an orange will be enough to make us click on a link:

The word "this" has a key role to play in the clickbait lexicon. "This" is the shrugging, indifferent teenager of the English language, a word so opposed to being helpful it can turn almost any informative headline into lazy clickbait by simply swapping it in for the subject of the sentence. It is used to disguise the often unspectacular truth of a story just long enough to make us click.

"This actor [who you've never heard of]..."

"Remember when this [thing you won't ever care about] happened..."

"Can you believe this [thing that's crushingly dull] just happened..."

It's Barbados by the way.

In between, we are invariably asked "Is this the funniest...", "the best..." or "the weirdest..." and everything seems to be "adorable", "funny" a "prank" or we're told it is "going viral" (in the hope it might).

* ...as long as it's the only Scottish football Vine you'll ever seen.

So taking an initiative from the Independent's John Rentoul and his banned list of words and phrases which have no place in good writing, I have started a 'Clickbait banned list'. If you're using one of the below then stop and ask yourself why. If it's because you want to over-promise and under-deliver, thus eroding the trust and respect of your readers, while insulting their intelligence and ensuring you become indistinguishable from everybody else overusing these lazy constructs, then carry on. But if that's not actually your long term goal then it's probably not too late to change.

Mar 19, 2015

Wednesday saw George Osborne deliver his latest budget. It must also have been National Get Drunk And Then Do Some Photoshopping Day.

The picture editor at the Daily Mail seems to have obliged, staggering back to their desk and staying conscious just about long enough to clumsily drop George Osborne's face onto the sun from the Teletubbies. Over at The Sun a cross-border drinking competition is surely the only explanation for George Osborne looking like Kim Kardashian north of the border, while south of the border (in every respect) George had some "epic strut" - whatever that is:

As well as creating front page images that will haunt our nightmares until at least the day we die, The Sun also this week unveiled a website dedicated to covering the election.

And then think the exact opposite. Add in a lump of reality TV troll Katie Hopkins and a large splash of Buzzfeed and you're getting close to the kind of nonsense The Sun has achieved with its Sun Nation site:

The Sun surely won't be offended to hear it described as the 'shallow end' of political discussion. Billed as 'Politics Without The Boring Bits', it clearly isn't meant to be anything more weighty or worthy than the sum of its rather tawdry parts, all held together, so far, by some fawning over David Cameron (whose "cut glass accent makes them feel all fuzzy inside" apparently), suggesting The Sun has decided who will have its backing in the General Election:

Although Cameron came sixth in The Sun's sexiest Prime Ministers list he can console himself with the site's overall positivity towards him and his party currently. (Pic: Sun Nation.)

Mar 15, 2015

So now we know. Ed Miliband has more kitchens than Nigel Farage has testicles.

And people say political journalism is dumbing down.

Yes, it turns out Farage has only got one ball which will do nothing to end some unwelcome comparisons to famous fascists from history. For good measure he's also written a book outlining his vision of a far-right revolution.

The book, entitled The Purple Revolution (which sounds more like a Prince tribute act), is being serialised by The Telegraph. So far we've learned two things: 1) One of Farage's testicles once swelled to the size of a lemon before it was removed, 2) The Telegraph certainly isn't shy about sending repetitive tweets.

Here's just a selection of their tweets from Saturday:

The "revolution" in question apparently began last year when Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless became the MPs for Clacton and Rochester and Strood. The previous MPs in those constituencies, of course, being Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless.

Some revolution.

The title and even the design of Farage's book also suggest it is in part a response to stand-up comedian Russell Brand, who in December last year described Farage as "a pound shop Enoch Powell" during one of the UKIP leader's many appearances on Question Time:

Coming to a pound shop near you? Farage's book bears a striking similarity in look and design to that of Russell Brand. (Credit: Amazon.co.uk)

Ed Miliband meanwhile, it has been revealed, is the proud owner of not one but TWO kitchens in his North London home.

Miliband's surplus of kitchens came to light after the Daily Mail's Sarah Vine (the wife of Tory chief whip Michael Gove, lest we forget) criticised Miliband's kitchen after it appeared on a BBC programme.

"Surely that can’t really be Ed and Justine’s kitchen?" wrote Vine, rambling to such an extent she almost stumbled accidentally upon some truth. "I hope for their sake it’s their utility room and some bossy spin doctor has shoved them in there to ...bolster Ed’s man-o’-the-people image."

Vine is on fairly thin ice with such kitchen-based snobbery, as a comment on the Mail's website pointed out:

You can remind yourself what else Michael Gove claimed on expenses here.

Also wading into kitchengate was Times journalist and Miliband family-friend Jenni Russell who pointed out the kitchen he was filmed in was just a "functional kitchenette", not to be confused with the Milibands' main kitchen which is "lovely" and definitely big enough to sit in (though possibly too big to be filmed in).

Russell's explanation of the differences between Miliband's various kitchens perhaps qualifies as a case of "with friends like that..." because Ed certainly doesn't need any more enemies right now. He's even got more enemies than kitchens.

And his enemies' enemy is clearly understatement.

"No kitchen since the Borgias has ever produced anything so toxic," wrote Robert Mendick of the Telegraph, with the same paper declaring in a separate article: "Ed Miliband's two kitchens expose the plastic inauthenticity of the Labour leader".

As the Telegraph's Michael Deacon noted of the inevitable and plentiful criticisms:

Jan 12, 2015

Fox News may have a rich history of mangling even the most self-evident of truths but even by their standards, "expert" terrorism commentator Steve Emerson turned the nonsense up to eleven when he told viewers:

"In Britain there are actual cities like Birmingham that are totally Muslim, where non-Muslims simply don't go in and parts of London there are religious Muslim police actually beat and actually wound seriously anyone who doesn't dress according to religious Muslim attire."

Fox News perhaps neither knew nor cared if any of this nonsense was true - of course it isn't - but the broadcaster was quickly criticised for giving such idiotic comments airtime.

Now Emerson has issued an apology, stating:

"I have clearly made a terrible error for which I am deeply sorry. And I am issuing an apology and correction on my website immediately for having made this comment about the beautiful city of Birmingham."

Obviously Birmingham is beautiful. Of that there can be no doubt. But based on his earlier comments it seems unlikely Emerson has ever been there, or even seen many pictures. So it's unclear how he knows how beautiful it is.

Did Emerson just assume nobody would check his ridiculous claims? Was he relying on nobody watching having ever been to Birmingham, or knowing anybody there? Or London for that matter?

In his statement there is little by way of explanation:

"I do not intend to justify or mitigate my mistake by stating that I had relied on other sources because I should have been much more careful. I am not going to make any excuses. I made an inexcusable error."

As did Fox News in broadcasting his claims. That lack of editorial judgement saw them become the subject of the hugely popular #FoxNewsFacts trend on Twitter:

Jan 10, 2015

Following the atrocities in Paris this week, conducted by a small group of people claiming to be Islamic extremists, media tycoon Rupert Murdoch has waded in to blame ALL muslims:

Perhaps Murdoch actually mistakenly believes 1.6 billion people are to blame for the despicable actions of a few. Or perhaps he is trying to inflame racial and religious tensions in the misguided belief that anger, acrimony and terror are good for newspaper sales and television viewing figures. Either way the media tycoon has faced fierce criticism over his ill-considered comments and may yet find some colleagues, investors and customers neither share nor appreciate his opinions.